Not sure what's going on with squats. 1RM is going up OK (205! beastly!) but reps are stagnating.

The wife and I got new phones a little while back; the new ones have a built-in pedometer. According to that, I average around 6000 steps per day, over 3 miles, with highs like today of 13000 steps, 7.67 miles. Even if they're somewhat inaccurate, that's a decent amount of walking for just walking around doing my day-to-day. I'm gonna go ahead and blame all the walking for my shitty squats

In other news, I'm getting really fucking sick of getting to the office in the morning and wondering what the scandal du jour is going to be

was going to do the press and pullup ladders, but my elbows were hurting, so I pumped up the gunz w/ pressdowns and curls. Elbows have gotten to the point where a layoff doesn't reset the pain; pretty soon they'll get to the point where they're just achy 24/7 and at that point it's bodywork time

Work is going to suck for the next few weeks. When work gets done sucking, I'm going to spend a few days alone with the wife in Yosemite. Then after that work will either suck some more or my training schedule will get a little more regular. We'll see.

At this point I'm trying to do what I can do, without hurting my elbows worse than they already are, and maybe rehab them a little bit. Plan is Day 1: front squats, some post chain move, couple sets of pressdowns and curls; Day 2: bench, back stuff, guns; Day 3: loaded carry, abs, guns. Not my ideal, but better than nothing.

Right elbow is on the inside of the joint. It's probably golfer's elbow. Rudimentary trigger point therapy (i.e., digging a finger in there and poking what hurts) and forearm stretches offer temporary relief. ART and direct biceps and triceps work seem to work more long term.

Left elbow is both on the inside and outside of the joint (golftennis?). The same treatment generally works. The confound here is that I have a birth defect on the left side. The most visible sign is that I only have two fingers on my left hand. But a lot of the supporting bone and musculature in the forearm is either underdeveloped compared to the right or is generally wonky. So sometimes it just hurts seemingly for no reason.

The ART stuff for poor people like Trigger Point Therapy gadgets and that twisty thing helped my elbows quite a bit way back when. IIRC, any stretching at all sucked the life out of it and made me whimper like a woman.

Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech
- Benjamin Franklin

I've barely done dick since that last post. I fooled around with my kettlebells some, and I'm shooting for 10,000 steps per day on the weekdays just to try to stay somewhat active. Beyond that, ingenting särskilt. I'm still trying to figure out how to balance work + family + lifting, and I haven't managed it yet.

My goal for the next few weeks is to find some kind of consistent schedule that works for me, even if that's only once or twice a week.

woo, consistency. lifted a little more after that last post, then took another few months off due to my aches and pains and some family medical stuff (everyone's OK now), then got back to it about two months ago. I picked a couple of lifts that I've always been terrible at (front squat and incline) and worked on them for a while. About six weeks in I got my old PRs in both for solid doubles, so yay. Not that either one is remotely impressive but I'll take some progress over none. Then both lifts stagnated so I'm changing things up a little.

Tuesday, 8/4 -- "A" Day

power clean:
95 x 3
115 x 1/2/3/1/2/3/1/2/3 +

front squat:
115 x 4 x 4 +

pullups superset with the above: BW x 30 total

abs, hip flexor stretch, pigeon

Form on power cleans was predictably janky after not doing them for about a year; actually got better as I got tired.